For the second year in a row, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game has largely barred over 400 permit holders in Cook Inlet’s east side commercial setnet fishery from putting any gear in the water. This summer, one group of setnetters is deploying experimental gear they hope will preserve king salmon runs and offer relief to the fishery.
On a recent overcast Thursday, Brian and Lisa Gabriel spend the day at the beach. Astride green and yellow tractors, they motor toward the end of a commercial fishing net that’s been pulled onto Cook Inlet’s shores. The net wriggles with shiny, silver sockeye salmon, which splash fishermen with wet sand as they flop around.
A waiting team of about 10 people plucks the fish from the net and tosses them into waiting totes, where they swim in murky water. One or two people occasionally peel off from the group, holding handfuls of writhing flounder they hurl back into the inlet.
The active fish can be a bit of a mess, but for the Gabriels, they’re an important indicator of success. The Gabriels are fishing with a seine net. In partnership with the state, they’re piloting and financing an experimental operation they hope will provide relief to one of the inlet’s oldest commercial fisheries.
For generations, the Gabriels have participated in Cook Inlet’s east side commercial setnet fishery. That fishery’s been around since the late 1800s and is a longstanding family tradition for many permit holders on the Kenai Peninsula.
Lisa and her husband Brian, who’s also the mayor of Kenai, have been set gillnetting since the 1980s. In response to recent unprecedented limits on the fishery, they are taking matters into their own hands. With a special permit from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, they’re dusting off a fishing method they considered a decade ago. The couple thinks the new technique could provide relief to permit holders facing another year of no fishing.
“Just by accident one time, we pulled our nets in and disconnected the one net, just because we had no beach,” Lisa said. “And my dad and I, when we pulled it in, we noticed that there was actually fish that weren’t gilled.”
Gillnets catch when fish swim into the diamond-shaped spaces in the net. Gills get caught on the net, and the fish can’t swim away. That makes the nets effective for catching fish, but also means most of the fish are dead by the time the net is pulled out of the water. That can be problematic when fishermen catch a non-target species — in the cast of the east side setnet fishery, king salmon.
For this project, the Gabriels are using custom seine nets. Those nets have smaller diamonds and create a barrier against fish passage. Instead of catching fish by the gills, the net billows with the tide and scoops the fish when it’s pulled back onto the shore. When the net hits the beach, the fish are still alive, including the occasional king salmon.
Brian says a fishing method that allows setnetters to get back in the water while also preserving king runs could be a “game-changer” for the fishery.
“Hopefully, it’s something other fishermen will get behind as an option,” he said. “Because really, I don’t see, you know, the king salmon coming back really anytime soon. So, if we can not catch kings and be able to harvest sockeye, that makes us a pretty ethical fishery.”
The Fish and Game closes the east side setnet fishery when it expects the Kenai River’s late-run king salmon fishery will fall short of state escapement goals. East side setnetters aren’t fishing for king salmon — they target sockeye. But sometimes, king salmon end up in their nets anyway.
The state has tried to minimize king salmon bycatch by significantly limiting the fishery’s hours. Last year, the state went one step further by closing the fishery outright before the season began. The unprecedented move was swiftly condemned by permit holders who said their way of life was on the line.
This year, the state Board of Fish offered a compromise. They approved an emergency measure that allows commercial fishermen in Cook Inlet to use dipnets. For Brian and Lisa Gabriel, that wasn’t realistic. So, they put their own idea forward — to use seine nets.
“We have been talking to the Board of Fish — the first thing like this was to have what we call proof of concept, right?” he said. “So you got to get past that stage, like, yeah, this is feasible, is it economically viable? All of these kinds of checking these boxes? Number one — the number one box: Are you saving kings? You know, that’s the whole point of this.
As of Friday, the operation has caught 10 king salmon, all of which were released alive back into Cook Inlet. No king salmon longer than 34 inches had been caught through the test fishery.
The Gabriels’ permit is valid until the end of August and allows them to fish the same hours as commercial dipnetters — three 12-hour days per week. They can sell any salmon caught during that time to help recoup the cost of running the test fishery. They can test gear on non-dipnetting days, but can’t keep any of the fish.
Their operation includes Robert Begich, a retired fisheries biologist with Fish and Game whose position is a stipulation of state approval of the permit.
“I’m the observer on the projects, biologist observer to ensure that all kings are released alive,” he said. “And we’ve been really successful at that — not removing them from the water and getting them back in. They’re real viable.”
Every time a fish is tossed in the tote, Begich presses on a clicker. When the net’s empty, he records data points about the catch in a notebook.
Beyond preserving king salmon, the Gabriels say fish caught with seine nets are fresher. In gillnets, fish may sit dead in the water until hauled in. But fish caught in seine nets are alive even after they’ve been transferred to a tote.
Brian said their team got off to a slow start. But by last week, they’d found their groove.
“We learned a lot quickly,” he said. “And I think we’re down now where we sort of, you know, we’re hitting, I think we’re hitting on all cylinders. We’ve gotten a lot of resources to do that. Everybody’s kind of jumping in, knows what they do — everything becomes a rhythm.”
Like a lot of experiments, the Gabriels’ project involved some trial and error. They started with a large seine net — 600 feet long and 60 feet deep — but it was too big.
So, they got a customized smaller one — 400 feet long and 30 feet deep. They’ve been working with Bulletproof Nets out of Homer. Employee Syd Paulino says the company doesn’t get commissioned for special projects often.
“I think a big part of what’s so exciting about it is knowing that the goal of it is to save this fishery and doing things that we know are going to have such a positive impact on the communities, our local communities” Paulino said. “I think that’s what really is exciting for us.”
The beach operation is a family affair. Eleven-year-old Harper Madrid is Brian and Lisa’s granddaughter. Clad in orange Grundéns and a turquoise rain jacket, she alternated between flinging flounder into the inlet and transferring sockeye into buckets. Madrid’s been fishing for years and says her job is to put the fish in totes and smack the running line to see if it would help keep fish in the net.
“So, they’re putting the net out there and they’re kind of using the running line to pull it in and trying to make, like, a horseshoe kind of,” she said. “And the fish, kind of, all, like, swim towards them, towards the end of the net. And we call that the money bag. That’s usually where most of the fish are.”
But the Gabriels aren’t the only family on the project. They’re fishing a site that belongs to Amber and Travis Every, a couple of third-generation setnetters. Amber says they hope to pass their operation onto their own kids.
“I think as long as large kings are in low abundance, we have to continue to look for alternative ways to harvest the surplus of sockeye and so, yeah, as long as we’re live-releasing kings there, everything that’s coming to the beach is well, alive and healthy,” she said.
At the end of the day, though, it’s still an experimental fishery. Fish and Game Commissioner Doug Vincent-Lang approved the Gabriels’ permit.
“It may be another year of experiments going forward based on what we saw for the first year, or it could be that we just try it out next year,” he said. “I think it’s premature at this point in time to figure out what we’re gonna do with it since we haven’t even seen a final report yet.”
Vincent-Lang has been out to the test site and says he’s “cautiously optimistic” about the results so far. He says the department is interested in finding a way for setnetters to fish again, but in a way that protects kings.
The Gabriels are also hopeful.
“It’s neat to see that we’re able to, you know, seine out the sockeye, our target species, and then let everything else go,” Brian said. “And we’re doing it in numbers that sort of make it economically viable for folks.”
The couple plans to take their experimental setup on the road by the end of the season to test how it works on other beach sites, as required by their permit. On Friday, they said they’d taken the operation to Salamatof, with similar success in method, so far.
